A typical web meeting shares visual data and voice data among multiple web meeting participants. In particular, the web meeting participants connect their client devices (e.g., personal computers, tablet devices, phones, etc.) to a meeting server (e.g., through the Internet, through the plain old telephone system, through a cellular network, etc.). Once the client devices are properly connected, the participants are able to view visual content, as well as ask questions and inject comments to form a collaborative exchange even though the web meeting participants may be scattered among remote locations.
For example, suppose that a participant calls into an existing web meeting using a regular phone and also connects to the meeting from a computer to view collaborative screen content. To this end, the participant will dial a telephone number of the meeting server and, when prompted by the meeting server, will enter (i) a meeting identification number (e.g., “123-456-789”) to identify a particular meeting and optionally may enter (ii) a participant identification number (e.g., “30”) to identify the participant. For this example, consider that the user does not yet have or cannot provide an identification code. As a result, the meeting server connects the participant to the correct web meeting and, whenever the participant speaks, the graphical web meeting interfaces displayed on the monitors of the respective client devices connected to that web meeting identify that participant as the person who is talking as “phone caller” or “unknown”.